Yang Yong works from a clean studio in a cleaned-up warehouse building on the edge of the most creative district in Shenzhen. Areas like these are popping up in cities around China now: havens of adaptive reuse, situated in former factory compounds and conceived vaguely along the model of Beijing’s 798, but without ever having gone through that pesky, delusional phase where the artists considered themselves fighters for a new order against an old one, righteous interlopers into a dying system. Shenzhen has never been a good place for dogma, and even if the area around the floor he shares with the architects of Urbanus and some old graphic-designer buddies is home to a branch of the local contemporary art museum, a few galleries, some cafes, and even lifestyle stores selling badly designed furniture, this does not impact Yang Yong, the painter who works with an assistant or two in a cavernous concrete room, adjusting his LCD projector such that a given digital image is cast with precision onto a canvas waiting to be painted in its image...

Photography has become one of the most innovative fields in Chinese art scene for the last decade. A new generation of artists, resorting to photography as their main language and medium, has emerged at the frontier of today’s art world. Their works are frequently related to the phenomenally rapid urbanisation and urban expansion. They are not only representing this spectacle of frenzy development in their photographic works but also playing active roles in the making of the spectacle itself… In other words, photo cameras have become their weapons to intervene in reality in an urban guerrilla manner.

No doubt, Yang Yong is one of the most outstanding among them...